The mudflats ended at the foot of a huge raised stone road of glass-fused black iron that sloped upward at a twenty-degree angle toward the base of Progenitor Vault Three. Here, at minus twenty thousand one hundred meters, the lithostatic pressure was nearly three gigapascals. But the huge structure before them showed zero load-bearing distortion.
Arthur stood at the base of the raised stone road, craning his neck back to take in the sheer, staggering size of the giant stone entrance.
The gates were nearly five hundred meters tall and one hundred and twenty meters wide, forged from a seamless slab of black stellar iron that absorbed all surrounding light. Etched across the entire expanse of the double doors were huge solar glyphs. Ancient pictograms depicting a three-legged golden crow soaring through a sea of nine blazing suns. He wrapped its wings around the molten core of the young Earth.
Arthur stood at the base of the huge portal. He pulled a small portable spectrometer from his tactical rig. He pressed the sight sensor against the dull black surface of the gates. The device chimed softly, displaying a metalworking readout that made his eyebrows rise in disbelief.
“Ninety-two percent refined stellar iron, with trace alloys of iridium, osmium, and steadied gravity mono-crystals,” Arthur read aloud, his voice muffled by his breathing mask. “This alloy doesn’t exist on the modern periodic table. To forge a gate of this size would need harnessing the magnetic field of a collapsing neutron star.”
